Both leisure and business travelers are already accustomed to continuing to use their smartphones during a visit to a foreign country. The only remaining barriers that minimize smartphone or other mobile computing device use by these travelers, also known as roamers, are high roaming rates and the difficulty in choosing a plan to provide access during the trip. As a result, to keep costs down roamers often will switch off data roaming in the settings of their smartphone or other mobile computing device and only use a visited roaming network for voice calls and SMS. These roamers often will wait to find a Wi-Fi network to access the internet for data services.
Unfortunately, from the perspective of both the home network system and the visited network system, this typical behavior results in a huge loss of potential revenue. As a result, this currently is costing this industry billions of dollars each year in lost revenue because roaming customers are not able to quickly and easily determine whether an affordable roaming package might be available.